by Aaron Elkins
And he was right. Yes, I was leery, even more leery than I'd been when I'd walked in, but I was fascinated too. Just what was he going to try to pull off?
"Well—I'd like you to understand one thing," I told him, proving Tony right once more. "If you're expecting any public comment from me tonight, or tomorrow for that matter, or the day after that—"
He frowned. "Public comment? Of what sort?"
"Of the sort that puts me out on a limb by referring to your painting as a Rembrandt. Or as not a Rembrandt. As far as I'm concerned, the attribution is undetermined until there've been adequate tests. That's what I'll have to say to the press or to anyone else who asks."
This time, I thought, I'd gone and put my foot in it. Goodbye, Rembrandt. If there was a Rembrandt.
But Vachey responded with more of his genial laughter. "Mr. Norgren, say whatever you like to whomever you wish. I wouldn't have it otherwise. Now then: is your mind at ease?"
I was being gently dismissed. "Of course," I said, standing up.
Not by a long shot, I thought. I hadn't come close to getting Vachey to change his mind about the testing. And I sure as hell didn't know the reason why. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hooked. You bet I wanted to know how this was going to turn out.
When I got back to the Hôtel du Nord, I checked frisson in my pocket English-French dictionary just for the hell of it. Shudder, chill, it said. A pleasurable sensation of terror or gloom. Great.
I went to bed and spent the afternoon sleeping off the rest of my jet lag. One thing was clear anyway: I was going to need my wits about me.
Chapter 5
"Okay, I got a question for you," Calvin said from the sofa against the far wall.
"Mm?" I was squinting into the mirror over the bureau, trying to insert, hook, and cinch the last of the various studs, straps, and clasps involved in getting oneself into a black-tie outfit. The reason I was squinting was that the du Nord, despite its many virtues, had a French hotel's typical disdain for illumination. There was one 25-watt floor lamp (at the opposite end of the room from the mirror), and two miniature bedside "reading" lamps lit by thickly frosted little bulbs in the shape of candles and with about the same power. That was it. This garretlike gloom added a certain dusky charm to the room, but it didn't make finding yourself in the mirror any easier.
It was 5:25 p.m. At 6:00 we were due at an elaborate pre-opening dinner in the famous old kitchens of Dijon's ducal palace, rented by Vachey for the occasion. Afterward, the privileged guests were invited to a reception and private showing of the paintings at Vachey's gallery. Calvin had come to my room to pick me up, since my hotel was two blocks closer to the gallery than his was.
"Let's hear it," I said. "What's the question?"
"Okay, what are you going to do if you go look at it tonight, and then you spend all week looking at it, and you still don't know for sure if it's a forgery or not? You going to recommend we forget about it and drop the whole thing?"
"Oh, I don't think it's a forgery, Calvin. I think Vachey's too sharp for that."
"What? You didn't agree with me yesterday they were forgeries?"
"I agreed they might be fakes. There's a difference between a fake and a forgery."
Calvin looked at me, willing to be amused. "Ok, I'll bite. What's the difference between a fake and a forgery?"
"No, I'm serious. A forgery is something somebody does on purpose—paints a phony Rembrandt, doctors it to make it look old, and then palms it off as the real thing."
"And that's not a fake?"
"Well, sure, it's one kind of fake, but there are other kinds of fakes that aren't forgeries at all, and those are the tough ones. Look, Rembrandt had hundreds of students, and in those days, part of the training was to make copies of the master's paintings. The harder they were to tell from the original, the more pats on the back they'd get from Rembrandt. So there are thousands of copies—perfectly legitimate Rembrandt copies—still floating around. They also had to copy his techniques in their own paintings. So there are also a lot of pictures around that aren't really copies of anything he ever did, but that are in his style. These things are all the right age for Rembrandt, they're done on the right kind of canvas or panel, they use the right pigments and binders, they even use his brush strokes."
"Jeez," Calvin said.
"That's not all. Rembrandt would stand there, right at their shoulders, and make corrections, a lot of them, right on their work, so quite a few of these paintings really are five or ten percent genuine Rembrandt. Well, sort of."
"Maybe, but they don't have his signature on them."
"But they do. In those days, any decent piece that came out of a workshop could have the master's signature on it. So we're talking about a lot of paintings that were sold as Rembrandts not three centuries later, but right out of the studio, while they were still damp. They have 350-year-old provenances."
"Jeez," Calvin said.
"Jeez is right." I finally got the bow tie properly aligned and slipped into my jacket. "Let's go. We don't want to miss anything."
Out on the Rue de la Liberté, the main commercial street of the Old City, it was a mild evening and the sidewalks were filled with shoppers and strollers. The Rue de la Liberté was Tony Whitehead's kind of street, eclectic as they come. Rough, half-timbered buildings from the fifteenth century stood cheek-by-jowl with elegant, mansard-roofed, nineteenth-century townhouses. Even the shops at street level had some odd juxtapositions. At the corner of Rue de Chapeau, for example, was Moutarde Maille, busy purveyor of mustards, on the very premises where messieurs Grey and Poupon first got together for business in 1777. Two doors down was an equally thriving McDonald's, busy doling out beignets d'oignon and frites, along with the occasional hamburger.
Strolling along, our tuxedos and patent leather shoes not drawing a second glance, I continued giving Calvin the bad news about fake Rembrandts.
"And then, of course, you can't forget about the crooks who came along centuries later and forged his signature on some of the old student paintings that he hadn't signed. That's all they had to fake, was the signature. A lot easier than a whole painting. And a lot harder to detect, since the rest of the picture checks out technically."
"No, no, something's wrong here," Calvin said. "Okay, maybe they check out as far as the materials and stuff go, but these are just art students, right? And we're talking about Rembrandt here, right? I mean, the Rembrandt. You're telling me it's that hard to tell the difference?"
I laughed. "Rembrandt had some pretty fair students: Fabritius, Aert de Gelder, Hoogstraten, Dou, Bol, Maes ..."
Calvin regarded me doubtfully, which was understandable. This was hardly a Who's Who of the world's great painters to most people. But to the educated person (you or me, for example), they were artists of the first rank.
"Take my word for it, Calvin, we're talking about some world-class painters here. And they didn't necessarily stop when they got out on their own. De Gelder was still turning out paintings in Rembrandt's style fifty years after Rembrandt died. I wouldn't want to bet my life, or yours either, on whether some particular painting was a Rembrandt, or a de Gelder in the style of Rembrandt. Not just from looking at it."
Calvin gave all this some thought. "Well, then," he said brightly, "I'd say you've got yourself a problem."
He didn't know the half of it. There are probably more dubious Rembrandts around than paintings by anyone else except maybe for Corot. According to Department of Customs records, 9,428 works by Rembrandt were imported into the U.S. from 1910 to 1950 alone. That works out to better than one every other day. Four a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for over forty years. Let it suffice to say that the figures are somewhat in excess of Rembrandt's actual rate of production. There is never a time when three or four of them are not the center of controversy. And that doesn't count the number, at least equal, in Europe. Or the U.S. Customs figures since 1950, which I didn't know and didn't want to know.
And even that wa
sn't the worst of it. To put it simply, these were not auspicious times to be too positive about Rembrandts. The Man with the Golden Helmet wasn't the only one that had run into trouble lately. The Art Institute of Chicago's well-known Young Woman at an Open Half-Door had recently been reattributed from Rembrandt to Hoogstraten.
Rembrandts, in truth, were the art world's equivalent of the African elephant and the mountain gorilla. "Endangered" was putting it mildly. Under the high-tech probings of modern science, formerly undisputed Rembrandts had been falling right and left. In 1921, there were 711; in 1968, 420. And by the time the international, fearsomely scholarly Rembrandt Research Project (referred to by grim curators behind closed doors as the Rembrandt Police) completes its long and unrelenting task of extirpation, it's expected there will be only 300 or so.
And only a little while ago came the dismaying news that even the beautiful, hauntingly evocative Polish Rider, pride of the Frick Collection, is apparently not what it seemed. It's not a happy period for those of us who used to be so sure we knew our Rembrandts.
"I'd say I had a problem too," I said.
"Okay, back to square one," Calvin said. "What do you do if you stare at this thing from now till Friday and you still can't make up your mind?"
I shook my head. "Calvin," I said, "you've got me."
We arrived a few minutes late at the Rue Rameau entrance to the palace courtyard in the midst of a swirl of dark, expensive cars dropping elegant couples at curbside like luminaries at a Hollywood premiere. A few tourists hung about on the sidewalk, not sure what they were watching. Across the street, more comfortably placed at outdoor cafe tables in the Place de la Libération, locals observed the goings-on over carafes of burgundy or chablis. There was even a French TV team that coaxed aside some of the incoming guests (it didn't take much coaxing) for a few words on camera.
The pomp and ceremony came as no surprise. Calvin had spent some time that afternoon with Madame Guyot, Vachey's gallery manager, and learned that we would be dining with an illustrious crowd indeed. Among the hundred invitees were France's most influential art critics, editors, and reviewers, along with some high government officials, including the Minister of Culture himself.
The show, Calvin had told me, was a much bigger affair than we'd thought. In addition to the Rembrandt and the Léger, there were another thirty-four Dutch and French paintings on display; the cream of Vachey's collection. Many were familiar to me. Some were justly famous. As far as I knew, none of them had any controversy attached to them. And all thirty-four would be donated to the Louvre on Vachey's seventy-fifth birthday, the following year—his way of expressing gratitude to the splendid country that had allowed him, the son of an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, to achieve success far beyond the most fantastic dreams his father had had for him.
Calvin and I, evoking no interest from onlookers or TV people, made it unimpeded through the courtyard to the palace wing that held the old kitchens. There our invitations were taken, and we were bowed through the massive oak door by a liveried flunky straight out of a Thomas Rowlandson drawing—knee britches, lace cuffs, and all.
"This," Calvin said with approval, "is going to be fancy."
* * *
Possibly it seems odd to you that a fancy dinner, thrown by a cultivated and flamboyant man like Vachey, for an exalted crowd like this, should be held in a kitchen, even a palace kitchen. If so, that's because you don't know the kitchens of le Palais des Dues et des Etats de Bourgogne.
These were probably the greatest kitchens the Western world has ever known, surpassing even those of Louis XIV at Versailles because the Sun King, whatever his other attributes, didn't come within miles of the dukes of Burgundy when it came to good eating. It was here, in these kitchens, that the great culinary traditions of Burgundy—of France, really—began in the fifteenth century, with the legendary banquets of Philip the Bold.
They didn't eat in the kitchens in those days, of course, but the old ducal dining rooms are gone now, or rather they, along with the rest of the palace, have been converted to the personal offices of the mayor of Dijon, which is a good deal for le maire, but a bad one for the rest of us. Fortunately, with proper French respect for gastronomic history, the kitchens have been preserved, and are still used as a reception and dining area for affairs of state and high society.
They were more than large enough for Vachey's hundred guests, consisting of a huge chamber with pitted stone columns, somber Gothic arches, and a floor of worn stone slabs that looked as if they'd been in place since Philip had laid them down in 1433, and probably had been. Back then, they had been able to roast not merely one but six whole oxen at the same time (and often did), but the six gigantic, vaulted fireplaces along the smoke-blackened walls, each with its own enormous chimney, had since been knocked down to open up even more space.
Inside, people were sitting down to tables of four or six, smooth and elegant in their gowns and tuxedos. Eyes shone, laughter trilled, voices were keen and excited—many of them raised in lively dispute. I heard Vachey ardently praised on one side of me, passionately damned on another. It was impossible not to feel the sense of anticipation in the air, and of privilege. This was the corps d'élite of the French art establishment; they knew it very well, and they also knew that they had been invited, almost by right, to an event that would be covered in the world press the next day, and possibly, given Vachey's reputation for dramatics, for some time to come.
Almost as soon as we got inside and paused to get our bearings, I noted a telltale, glittery bulge in Calvin's beady eyes. Following his line of sight, I saw a table at which sat a stern-looking middle-aged man and woman and a flashy younger woman with a wandering eye of her own—Calvin's type, all right—who looked as if she might be their daughter. The fourth chair was vacant.
"Go ahead, Calvin," I said.
He didn't bother pretending not to know what I was talking about. "Well, no, there's only one chair, Chris, and I wouldn't want to leave you—"
"Calvin, will you please go? There are bound to be some other people here I know. I can renew old acquaintances. Besides, I hate it when you drool."
"Well, if you really think so . . ."
And off he went. I didn't think he'd get very far right under mama's and papa's baleful gazes, but with Calvin you could never tell. I was on my way to join a French art professor I knew slightly when a snatch of conversation caught my ear over the general hubbub, probably because it was in English, not in French, and in heavily Italian-accented English at that.
"But aren't the very distinctions themselves simply the old, worn-out objectivist reifications?" the lilting, high-pitched voice was asking. "Surely you agree, ah-ha-ha, that terms such as 'real' and 'false,' 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' are outmoded constructs whose validity was never more than contingent at best? Surely we can reject out of hand the notion that any field of existence has a 'reality' outside of its own system of reference?"
It may be that there were several people in the world who were capable of uttering such a statement, but I, personally, knew only one: the many-faceted Lorenzo Bolzano, collector-son of a collector-father, adjunct professor of the philosophy of art criticism at the University of Rome, and European editor of the staggeringly abstruse Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary (to which I had yet to encounter a single, solitary subscriber). The learned Lorenzo was surely the wackiest scholar I knew, with views ranging from mildly laughable to stupefyingly incomprehensible. Hearing his voice wasn't altogether a surprise. Lorenzo, like his father before him, was a longtime and no doubt highly valued client of Vachey's gallery, and I'd thought he might be on the invitation list for tonight's exclusive affair.
And here he was, astride, unless I was mistaken, one of his favorite metaphysical hobbyhorses, the mind-bending notion that there is no valid distinction between an original work of art and a forgery. If you're thinking, so what, that was merely the same thing Vachey had been telling me that morning, then you've missed the gist
of Lorenzo's speech. (Don't blame yourself.) Vachey had been probing into the elements of perception that affect our attitudes toward art and forgery. An unsettling topic, considering the situation, but not unreasonable in itself. Lorenzo was carrying things a giant step further, maintaining that there was simply no difference—literally no difference—between authentic art and counterfeit art, and that any distinction we tried to impose was purely artificial, with no aesthetic, empirical, or other foundation.
Did he really believe it? As far as I could tell: yes. That and a lot of other equally goofy ideas. Or maybe he didn't quite believe them, but he was so in love with the words and the crazy, convoluted philosophical mazes they led through that it was the next best thing to believing them.
But if he was a crackpot, he was an amiable crackpot, fun to argue with, unfanatical, obsessed not so much with his cockeyed theories as with the pleasures of argument. He could even be lucid and down-to-earth for long periods—sometimes minutes at a time—and was, moreover, one of the gentlest, sweetest-tempered people I knew, always a pleasure to run into. And there he was, gesticulating over his plate, gawky and hollow-chested, bald and beaky-nosed, his button eyes shiny with the excitement of discourse.
He was at a table with two other men, both of whom I'd met before. One was the stout and self-important Edmond Froger, director of the Musée Barillot, and part-time art critic for the Revue Critique d'Art. The Barillot, you may remember, was the small Dijon museum from which Vachey had temporarily stolen—excuse me, had caused to be taken—six paintings, about a decade earlier. That incident, while amusing to many, had never struck Froger's funny bone, and his continuing antipathy to Vachey was no secret. What he was doing there as Vachey's guest was anybody's guess.